Scalable and Replicable Watershed Resilience Evaluation | W81EWF 24 SOI 0030

Opportunity Information: Apply for W81EWF 24 SOI 0030

The Scalable and Replicable Watershed Resilience Evaluation opportunity is a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) cooperative agreement focused on building practical, repeatable ways to measure and improve resilience across entire watersheds. The core idea is to move beyond one-off, location-specific studies and instead create customizable processes, methods, and tools that different watershed jurisdictions around the country can adopt and apply. A major emphasis is understanding how community-level projects and systems depend on one another to keep essential watershed functions running, especially when facing both isolated threats to specific places and multiple, compounding threats that affect the whole basin.

The project is organized around two main objectives. Objective 1 centers on developing a methodological toolbox for quantifying resilience and supporting mitigation decisions at the watershed scale. ERDC will run field campaigns and provide the resulting data to the selected recipient, who will then analyze that information to identify vulnerabilities and interdependencies among critical functions and infrastructure. The work is expected to align with ERDCs existing resilience research, particularly the Resilience Matrix framework, which evaluates resilience across three phases (absorb, recover, adapt) and three domains (physical, information, social). Under this objective, the recipient is expected to produce replicable approaches to (1) identify and prioritize critical infrastructure at both community and watershed levels, (2) analyze which critical assets are most vulnerable to a wide range of threats (with a primary focus on the Savannah River Basin), (3) evaluate supply and demand for critical functions supported by the highest-priority infrastructure, (4) analyze interdependencies among infrastructure and primary functions, (5) assess consequences of disruptions at local and watershed scales, (6) build a screening and visualization tool that highlights vulnerabilities and potential failure points, and (7) document how to use that screening tool in collaborative settings that include both public and private stakeholders.

Objective 2 is about building collaborative decision-making approaches that help communities and jurisdictions form a shared, watershed-wide vision of resilience. Here again, ERDC will provide data and the recipient will conduct more complex analyses aimed at producing decision support methods that connect local priorities with broader watershed challenges. The expected output is a deliverable describing tools and methods to prioritize actions in ways that measurably enhance resilience while accounting for competing needs across the basin. Key activities include methods to identify watershed objectives and priorities, assess where priorities align or conflict (finding both synergies and friction points), help communities identify and make use of government resources, develop and communicate scenarios that support collaborative decisions, and create serious-game style applications (described as sim city like) that let stakeholders test different resilience strategies against plausible scenarios.

A key deliverable theme across both objectives is usability and transferability. The program specifically calls for products that can be packaged into a playbook format so watershed jurisdictions can customize the approach and replicate it elsewhere. The effort is also intended to interface with, and potentially be combined with, related ERDC technology transfer work so that the resulting methods and tools can be adopted by others over time.

This is a discretionary science and technology research and development award issued as a cooperative agreement (CFDA 12.630). The opportunity expects a single award with a ceiling of $215,000. Eligibility is restricted to non-federal partners of the Piedmont-South Atlantic Cooperative Ecosystems Studies Unit (CESU). Applicants should also pay close attention to requirements around disclosures of current and pending support, since incomplete or problematic disclosures can make an applicant ineligible, and ERDC may request updates before award and during the performance period with the possibility of discontinuing funding if issues arise. The original closing date listed for submissions was 2024-07-31 under funding opportunity number W81EWF 24 SOI 0030.

• The Engineer Research and Development Center in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Scalable and Replicable Watershed Resilience Evaluation" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 12.630.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2024-05-30.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2024-07-31. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $215,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 1 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others.

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